Revision as of 16:11, 13 February 2007

JFace is a UI toolkit with classes for handling many common UI programming tasks. JFace is window-system-independent in both its API and implementation, and is designed to work with SWT without hiding it. JFace includes the usual UI toolkit components of image and font registries, text, dialog, preference and wizard frameworks, and progress reporting for long running operations. Two of its more interesting features are actions and viewers. The action mechanism allows user commands to be defined independently from their exact whereabouts in the UI. Viewers are model based adapters for certain SWT widgets, simplifying the presentation of application data structured as lists, tables or trees.

New in Eclipse 3.2 is the JFace data binding framework. Data binding allows linking UI elements and models so that users can edit or view the data in the model. The framework makes it easy to connect data sources to widgets such as text fields, combos, tables and trees, for viewing and editing. Using it relieves developers from writing and registering listeners with widgets and model objects.

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Using JFace outside the Eclipse platform

JFace can be used in standalone SWT+JFace apps, without requiring the Eclipse Runtime or other parts of the Eclipse Platform. This has been made easier to do in 3.2, with the only prerequisites for JFace being reduced to SWT, the new org.eclipse.equinox.common plug-in, and org.eclipse.core.commands plug-in.